Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging symbolic elements in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect. It encompasses a diverse range of human activities, creations, and modes of expression, including music, literature, film, photography, sculpture, and paintings. Generally, art is made with the intention of stimulating thoughts and emotions.
Because there are millions of pieces of art available for purchase online, the individual seeking to discover new art is confronted with a “needle in the hay stack” challenge of locating a piece of art that satisfies that individual's subjective and objective preferences. One current challenge individuals face when attempting to discover art is that the current technology fails to provide an effective, intuitive, and efficient discovery tool that can help a user navigate through millions of art images to find a preferred art image, based on one or more searchable art-related dimensions.
Some traditional tools allow an individual to search for art based on a keyword entry that can be used as a query to search for art within a group (e.g. a database), based on, for example, a piece of art's title, an artist's name, or a medium (e.g., a painting, tapestry, or sculpture). However, these tools limit the search to a small number of characteristics that result in resultant images that may be poorly correlated to the initial query. Additionally, the keyword search essentially acts as a filter narrowing the possible choices.
Another problem with these tools is that they are based on the assumption that the individual generally knows what he or she is looking for. Traditional tools are designed to converge on a single result, in a manner that is similar to searching the Yellow Pages for an address for a specific retailer or searching for the answer to the question, “What is the capital of California.” This approach may be effective for an individual seeking a particular piece of art, such as a specific work created by Mark Rothko or a twentieth-century Rwandan bottle, for example; however, traditional tools fail to effectively help those individuals seeking to discover new art. Therefore, prior art has focused on the destination, the end goal of a search for art, not on the journey or the individual's path of discovery leading up to the end goal.
An individual who is on an educational journey to discover art may only possess a notion about the type of art that they are seeking. For example, they may only have a notion about a color scheme, a choice of lighting, a theme, or a subject used in the art; however, the individual may not initially have a preference concerning the other aspects, such as the medium (i.e. photograph, painting, tapestry, sculpture, etc.), and/or the artist.
In some cases, when discovering an art image, an individual may determine that only a subset of qualities of the image is desirable. In this case, the individual may wish to find more art that has these desirable qualities. However, traditional tools fail to provide an efficient, user-friendly method to allow the individual to effectively broaden the previous search into a new search for those art images that have the desirable qualities.
Therefore, the failure of current search technology to accurately and effectively allow an individual to discover art images based on particular, searchable dimensions limits the individual's discovery of art.